>“You don’t have any accomplishments,” the lawyer told him. “You don’t have a patent, or even a product.” That scolding spurred Sanjay to make a list of what he needed to do to achieve his goal of staying permanently. He improved the technology his AI-based firm was developing, expanded its customer base, and filed for a U.S. patent, which was awarded earlier this year. In May those efforts paid off, allowing him to…
Not any more than other patent applicants. Currently all the layers in patent application process is incentivized to ignore quality. 1. Large companies pay a bonus for every patent applied and bigger one for approval. 2. Patent lawyers are paid for filed patents. 3. Patent office makes money on each patent. They view the review process as a cost center and optimize it for fast approval.
New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers
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Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers
#42>“You don’t have any accomplishments,” the lawyer told him. “You don’t have a patent, or even a product.” That scolding spurred Sanjay to make a list of what he needed to do to achieve his goal of staying permanently. He improved the technology his AI-based firm was developing, expanded its customer base, and filed for a U.S. patent, which was awarded earlier this year. In May those efforts paid off, allowing him to…
Not any more than other patent applicants. Currently all the layers in patent application process is incentivized to ignore quality. 1. Large companies pay a bonus for every patent applied and bigger one for approval. 2. Patent lawyers are paid for filed patents. 3. Patent office makes money on each patent. They view the review process as a cost center and optimize it for fast approval.
Hasn't it always been the case? There's a ton of old patents for shit which can't work as described.
Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
They just created a giant loophole that will be easy to game. Patents are easy to get and someone will come up with a startup mill that will be nothing but a visa factory.
>> Patents are easy to get How many do you have? Patents are more difficult to obtain than HN gives credit and they cost a non-inconsequential amount of money too.
That seems like an odd retort to me. Like I have zero because I find the whole idea ethically dubious. When I was at IBM, they had occasional patent brainstorming meetings. I remember saying to one of the more senior engineers that everything I worked on was straightforward/obvious, and he told me I'd be surprised, which didn't do much to sway my thoughts on the ethics there.
Everyone who had been there for a few years had a couple patents. I don't remember any of them now, which I guess is sort of the point: it was all basic stuff that would be very difficult to honestly characterize as an "invention".
Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers
#44>“You don’t have any accomplishments,” the lawyer told him. “You don’t have a patent, or even a product.” That scolding spurred Sanjay to make a list of what he needed to do to achieve his goal of staying permanently. He improved the technology his AI-based firm was developing, expanded its customer base, and filed for a U.S. patent, which was awarded earlier this year. In May those efforts paid off, allowing him to…
Reply from non-USA who has worked in USA. Many companies already spam the patent office with low-quality/non-existent inventions. One put a quota on us for number of submissions, so that led to at least 200 a year from one firm knowing full well the vast majority would go nowhere. Another would file at least one with every product and delay the evaluation as long as possible to game the system so they could write "pa…
There's another reason too:
Having a large number of patents for a given subject matter makes it a veritable arsenal for use against other companies, either offensively or defensively (since a common defense to a lawsuit of patent infringement is a countersuit with your own parent infringement lawsuit). Gotta feed the dancing gorilla
Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers
#45[flagged]
Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers
#46>“You don’t have any accomplishments,” the lawyer told him. “You don’t have a patent, or even a product.” That scolding spurred Sanjay to make a list of what he needed to do to achieve his goal of staying permanently. He improved the technology his AI-based firm was developing, expanded its customer base, and filed for a U.S. patent, which was awarded earlier this year. In May those efforts paid off, allowing him to…
Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers
#47Expect further downward pressure on US tech salaries.
Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers
#48Expect further downward pressure on US tech salaries.
My employer cannot hire H1Bs. They are prohibited by law. All employees must be US citizens. They pay extremely competitive rates. They are the reason for and a source of complaints regarding gentrification in my area. edit: as an example the starting rate for high school work-study and college interns is the hourly equivalent of $78k/yr plus the same benefits as full-time employees from the second they show up. The…
Hard-STEM seems to have lots of jobs where you can grind your ass off for the better part of a decade or two and hope to make $100-120k/yr by then if you're lucky. At least on the coding side you'll get to that level within a handful of years if you're willing to job switch often and optimize for that salary. Glad to hear there's at least one hard-STEM place where the grind isn't as bad.
Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers
#49The US is and always has been a country of immigrants. Your idea of who is and isn't an immigrant is simply a question of what time window you choose. In 1800, the US had a population of ~2 million. by 1900 it was ~50 million. You want to guess how itt got that way?
Let's dispense of the common issues:
1. Tech layoffs. This is unrelated to immigration. This is de facto employer colusion to suppress wages. Notice how all the tech companies started doing layoffs at about the same time? The counterargument is "economic conditions". You may have a point with VC funding drying up due to rising interest rates but many of the biggest companies are massively profitable. Profits tend to fall so they want to suppress costs to maintain profits. That's it.
I will say that layoffs should basically prohibit you from applying for more work visas for a period. For example: if you've laid off anyone in the last year, sorry you can't sponsor a work visa. You can escape this by, say, paying severance of at least a year's total compensation. The point is to remove the economic incentive of suppressing wages from the layoff-then-rehire cycle.
2. Lowering wages. Restricted immigration actually lowers wages. Why? Because it allows employs to pay undocumented workers less. Poultry farms are an excellent example of this. They pay undocuemnted workers less. If they ever start making noise about wages or conditions, you clear them out by calling in an ICE raid, pay a nominal fine, rinse and repeat.
How do we know this? Because when states actually go after employers rather than the workers, it's an economic disaster [1].
Also, we used to have a temporary worker program for seasonal and agricultural workers called the Bracero program. This filled an economic need. Eliminating it created more undocumented residents because crossing the border became too difficult and expensive.
3. A rising tide lifts all boats. There's mountains of evidence for this (eg [1]). Unions increase non-union wages. If we didn't have wage suppression by forced undocumented workers it would raise wages for everyone.
Immigrants aren't "stealing your jobs" or "lowering your wages". There's a long history of trying to blame immigrants instead of (correctly) blaming the concerted effort by capital owners to lower your wages.
[1]: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/alabamas-immigratio...
[2]: https://www.workrisenetwork.org/working-knowledge/unions-rai...
Re: New U.S. immigration rules spur more visa approvals for STEM workers
#50I'm a little surprised to see a number of anti-immigraiton comments on this thread, some of which you could describe as reactionary. The US is and always has been a country of immigrants. Your idea of who is and isn't an immigrant is simply a question of what time window you choose. In 1800, the US had a population of ~2 million. by 1900 it was ~50 million. You want to guess how itt got that way? Let's dispense of th…